A practicable decimal system for Great Britain and her colonies / by R.T. Rohde.

  • Rohde, R. T. (Robert Turner)
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practicable decimal system for Great Britain and her colonies / by R.T. Rohde. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    matters which we do not wish to be vexed with ourselves, but which we imagine our successors will have no difficulty in arranging satisfactorily; our forefathers did the same for us. The adoption of any system of decimal currency will necessitate the alteration in value of at any rate some denominations of our money. The re-coinage of our light gold forces us to devise some means of providing ^1,000,000 to pay the cost, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, anxious to do this without incurring the odium of a direct tax, has suggested the depreciation of our ros. piece. Why can we not make up our minds to face the decimal difficulty at the same time ? Let us keep our sovereigns up to their full value by all means, but when reducing our half-sovereign to a token, or withdrawing it altogether in exchange for silver money, let us provide the cost of a decimal currency at once by altering our silver coins, which everyone knows to be mere tokens that obtain their circulating value by convention and not by intrinsic worth.* The Parliamentary Committee of 1853, in summing up their report on decimal coinage, while fully cojicurring with all the witnesses examined by them as to the great advantages of a decimal system, fully recognised that any change would be accompanied by some inconveniences, but desired to record their conviction that the obstacles were not of stich a nature as to create any doubt of the expediency of introducing that system, and stated their belief that the necessary inconvenience atte?iding a transition state would be far more than compensated by the great and permanent benefits which the change would confer upo?i the public of this country, and of which the advantages will be participated in to a still greater extent by future generations. A whole generation has passed since this report was made, and the only step taken so far has been the coinage of the florin and the sanction of the cental or 100 lb. weight for corn transactions. It is obvious that if there had been 1,000 instead of 960 farthings in the pound sterling the materials * It is this convention that distinguishes a coin from a medal, which latter although it be of the same intrinsic value, will not pass from hand to hand* nor be accepted as representing the same nominal value as the coin.